Achieving 100 percent compliance to perioperative antibiotic administration: a quality improvement initiative

Timely administration of prophylactic antibiotics within 60 minutes before surgical incision is important for reducing surgical site infections. This quality improvement initiative aimed to work towards achieving 100% compliance with perioperative antibiotic administration.

We examined the workflow in our Anaesthesia Information Management System (AIMS) and proposed interventions using cause-and-effect analysis of anonymised anaesthetic records from eligible surgical cases extracted from AIMS. This ultimately led to the implementation of an antibiotic pop-up reminder. The overall process was done in a few small plan-do-study-act cycles involving raising awareness, education and reorganisation of AIMS before implementation of the antibiotic pop-up reminder. Data analysis took place from August 2014 to September 2016. Compliance was defined as documented antibiotic administration within 60 minutes before surgical incision, or as documented reason for omission.

The median monthly compliance rate, for 33,038 cases before and 28,315 cases after the reminder was implemented, increased from 67.0% at baseline to 94.5%. This increase was consistent and sustained for a year despite frequent personnel turnover. Documentation of antibiotic administration also improved from 81.7% to 99.3%, allowing us to identify and address novel problems that were initially not apparent, and resulting in several department recommendations. These included administering antibiotics later for cases with predicted longer-than-expected preparation times and bringing forward antibiotic administration in lower-segment Caesarean sections.

The use of information technology and implementation of an antibiotic pop-up reminder on AIMS streamlined our work processes and brought us closer to achieving 100% on-time compliance with perioperative antibiotic administration.